Amateurs in Eden: The Story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell

By Joanna Hodgkin

Book Overview

Nancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Ana s Nin said 'I think often of Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again.' As the first wife Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, it is perhaps surprising that she is an unknown entity, a constant presence in the biographies of Durrell and others in the Bloomsbury set, yet always a shadowy figure, beautiful and enigmatic.

But who was the woman who was with Durrell during the most important years of his development as a writer? Joanna Hodgkin decides to retrace her mother's fascinating story: the escape from her toxic and mysterious family; the years in bohemian literary London and Paris in the 1930s; marriage to Durrell and their discovery of the 'Eden' of pre-war Corfu and her desperate struggle to survive in Palestine alone with a small child as the British Mandate collapsed. Amateurs in Eden is a fascinating biography of a literary marriage and of an unusual woman struggling to live an independent life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844087948
• ISBN13: 9781844087945
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.0" x 7.7"